FOREVER LEAVING THE OLD LIFE

If someone has paid the highest price to give you an extraordinary gift, you would not take it lightly. You wouldn’t despise their generosity, (perhaps even their sacrifice), by casting aside what they had intended for your great good and purpose.

This is why Paul comes in Ephesians 4 and tells the followers of Christ to “walk worthy of the high calling with which we have been called” (Ephesians 4:1). God has created us, called us, sent His Son to redeem us, and His Spirit to indwell us. Why would we ignore this and settle for the same disastrous life that we once had, acting as if we had never been delivered?

LOOK AT THE OLD LIFE

To help us remember, He rehearses what our old life was like, the life without Christ, the life that is right now being experienced by all those who do not have Him. Listen to their experience described in vivid terms in Ephesians 4:17-19.

They are now (and we once were) …

·       Futile in their thoughts

·       Darkened in their understanding

·       Excluded from the life of God

·       Experiencing ignorance because of the hardness of their hearts

·       Calloused

·       Given over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity

·       Filled with a desire for more and more

Read through that list again and then once more. Let the magnitude of your deliverance sink in. By the grace of God (and purely by grace as Paul outlined in Ephesians 2), all those who know Christ have been rescued from such disastrous lives. Why would we dip back into such living in any measure? Paul reminds us to continually “Put off” that old man and “Put on” the new man and be progressively “renewed in the spirit of our minds.”

We were made for more. We have more in Christ, we are more, and are headed for an eternity of more. So don’t grieve the Holy Spirit by allowing the deceptions and temptations of the world to take you back into the old ways.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory